


debridement

by iniquiticity



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roaring Twenties, Blood and Violence, Empathy, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Personal Growth, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scars, Second Chances, Things Unsaid, lengthy exposition, reference to past dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 11:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18915925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iniquiticity/pseuds/iniquiticity
Summary: You laid in the pool of your own blood where they had left you and thought about your speakeasy, and your friends, but primarily the man you had stupidly forced the hand of.Then the man came back.





	debridement

**Author's Note:**

> thanks nim for helping me get this off the ground (a lot), and for chy for a few finishing touches. as always, you can find me on tumblr at [iniquiticity](http://iniquiticity.tumblr.com), or on twitter at [@picklesnake](https://twitter.com/picklesnake).
> 
> this story contains significant reference to past violent events (of various levels of severity).

**

From the secret window the noise of the bar drifted into Washington's office. It had been much louder before his beating, but he was sure that was due to the beating and nothing else. The bar had been closed for a while after the raid, after his associates had argued with women codebreakers and the police and other sort of people that liked to stick their noses into everyone's business. People, he was sure, thought this was the end of the Patriot.

Lafayette had dragged him off and nursed him back to health. The cops hadn't been able to shut the place down. The people who got the bar gave it back to him. He got some fake teeth and a cane and got things going. 

When he was lying there and Lafayette had to help him use the toilet, he had a lot of time to think. He was proud of the business; there was no doubt about that. Yet, he had regrets. About Martha, and Lawrence, and Alexander. The most about Alexander, that he'd left. 

George could have been -- 

He could have had Alexander not leave. You laid on the pool of your own blood and you wondered where young men in your employ were. If they would read about your death in the paper. If they would feel anything. 

He'd been in the war but certainly it wasn't like Alexander had been. He knew the stories before they'd been censored. He had read the letters about the shelling and the mud and the gas and the trenchfoot and the way you dug trenches and pulled out corpses of your friends. 

Sometimes George heard the bar’s patrons talking about the war. They relived it unpleasantly, with the strained laughter of trying to cope. But Alexander --- Alexander never talked about what he saw, what he had felt, what it was like. If the topic turned to the war, Alexander did the thing he hated the most: shut up. 

George had tried to track down those war surgeons who might sate his hunger when Alexander did not. The search had turned up empty. Those surgeons were dead, or they did not know the people they helped, or maybe they did not wish to disclose, or maybe, like Alexander, they could not. They were bound so utterly by the horrors of it that they could not escape it, or perhaps it could not escape them.

He heard Alexander scream at night, when he was working late. He wondered how to ease the man’s suffering and coveted the knowledge of his body. Once he had ignored the former, because it had all seemed so silly, to want a person who could deny you. Now he found the former a much more interesting and important puzzle. Alexander, of course, rejected the notion of shell shock, rejected weakness and dependence. George had read the secret medical literature, about the moods, about depression, about the fits and starts, and drinking. 

Funny what you thought, when you laid in a pool of your own blood, waiting to die. When the police beat you and laughed, and you fought back at first, of course you did - and you put a few good hits on them, because you’ve put a few good hits on people in your time - but there were more of them then there were of you, and eventually they wrestled you down and just beat the shit out of you until they lost interest, or maybe they thought you were dead. Maybe he had lost consciousness, or maybe he had been awake the whole time and the black spots in his memory were blinks that seemed long. 

Sure he had been proud of the business. He’d missed Lawrence. Wondered if this is what it had felt like for Lawrence, when he had wilted away, beaten by an invisible enemy. Had George’s bloody coughs, where he spat shattered teeth, been the same? 

But in that moment, he thought nothing of the conquests. The conquests were meaningless. Networks of intelligence and bodies and pleasure and one move after another - it was all worthless. It was worthless and somehow in that moment, pain blistering through him, eyes swollen shut - he knew it was worthless. 

What had not been worthless? He had thought of Lafayette, and been grateful for him. Not only for the money, but for his unending adoration, and his limitless talents, and his laughter, and the ease that he put George at. That’s what you thought about, when you lay in the pool of your own blood. You thought about rich French orphans who just wanted you to like them, and you did like them, and it was wonderful. 

He thought of everyone else, of Henry and John and all the others who ran the bar. Felt grateful to know them. 

He thought of Alexander and felt regret. You would think it would be impossible to regret, with what he had done, with what he was capable of. Oh, that was wrong. He thought about every time he had pressured Alexander about his clothes, about the hidden lines of scars under his shirt, about how Alexander would leave whatever room they were in. He thought about the stupid anger he had at those moments, as if he had been denied something that was his. Idiot, he berated himself, laying there. You were so successful and this one eluded you because you couldn’t see your nose in front of your own face. 

He had a lot of time to think about that. He couldn’t do anything about the regret. He could not quit everything and chase the boy down. He had to wait, or suffer and be punished. Something you got punished. Sometimes you slipped and the man you cared about left. Sometimes you slipped and the police beat the shit out of you. 

Then Alexander came back.

All those thoughts hardened into resolve. He did not just have to regret. He could try again. He had been nursed back to health by Lafayette and sure there was the bar but what he had actually been given a second chance for was for this absolutely spectacular young man that he had wronged. 

They played chess. Alexander was rusty. George beat him, a few times. George asked about the accounting firm that he set up in Chicago. Alexander had nonchalant answers. It had been fine. The business had been good. The city was fine. The beer wasn’t as good, but better than the watery shit George was currently selling, even though he knew supply was messed up right now. 

Alexander had been upset that he hadn’t known about the beating until weeks later. George had shrugged, but oh, what his chest did. To know Alexander had cared, even an inch, even a splinter of it -- 

\-- the speakeasy boss that had his heart wrenched, when the boy he cared for said it. 

So. Better this time. Read about shell shock, and don’t ask about the war, or clothes, or bodies. Be a little depreciating, about the mismatched eyes and the broken nose and the gold teeth and the limp and the deafness in that ear. Laugh about the scar on his head, where the boot had split his scalp and Lafayette had sewn it together, poorly. 

\-- I would have helped you, if I’d been here, Alexander said. 

He would have told the Alexander not to go to Ypres. And Alexander would not have listened, would he? Never. 

Lots of chess. Talking about money, and the bar.

Talking about himself. Strange, to do it. He barely had, before this. What other men - and women - knew about him could fit in the palm of his hand, and he had liked it just that way. He decided that he could give it all to Alexander, if he wanted. He would tell Alexander anything he asked, and he would be truthful and honest and forward. He would not make the same mistake twice, where he had given the wrong thing and taken too much. 

He told Alexander about Lawrence. That still hurt, so many years later, worse than his beating. And his mother, in brief, and his father, briefer. About his own experience with the war, so much more sterile and safe. About the bar, and his fascination with architecture, and the secret rooms. About how he had met Henry, and John, and Phillip, and Deborah. Strange, to give it all away. Freeing, like a weight lifted from him. 

Alexander gave some. Less. But some. Explained how he’d ended up at Passchendaele before the Americans were there. Talked about his past. His father had left. He was born out of wedlock. His mother had died. There had been hard years. Then he went to the front. Now he was here. 

One day they played chess. George won. He won about half the time now - vastly more than he had before he’d been beaten and Alexander left and returned. Some games he quit because of the headaches, and sometimes mid-game Alexander would hear a noise, imagined or otherwise, and lose focus. Those they discarded. The games they did play - they split. 

Alexander was staring at the pieces. It was so late it was early, early enough that the bar was quiet. They both slept poorly, and they had been playing for an hour or two, that morning. George had heard Alexander’s screams about gas, that morning. George had woken from the pain in his knee. A little walk tended to take the pain away, with pills. He went to get coffee. Alexander was already there. 

So they played. 

***

Sometimes they lay together. Not like what George wanted, which seemed unimaginably brutish in retrospect. They would lay together in George’s bed and just be, in their bedclothes, awake. It started when Alexander, shit drunk, had appeared in his bedroom and demanded to know things from the past about war plans. George told him. Alexander cursed General Haig, mostly, with his familiar energy. He cursed rain and mortars but Haig, mostly, and he made George promise that had he ever met Haig, he would give him a thorough beating. Then had fallen into George’s bed and gone to sleep. 

George wasn’t going to _not_ go to bed in his bed, no matter what Alexander did. So he put on sleeping clothes and went to bed, and then he woke up with Alexander snuggled - that was the word, for sure, no less - with onto him. Alexander’s head was on his chest and one hand sprawled over his stomach and the other curled close and his legs bent at the knee into him. What George noticed was that Alexander’s face was relaxed, so much less familiar tension. He looked like a stranger, when he was eased from all his worries. He was beautiful. 

George used to deny that he had this thought, that Alexander was beautiful. Not that Lafayette wasn’t beautiful, and Martha wasn’t beautiful, and all those other men and women who wanted to impress him weren’t beautiful, but they --

Before the beating, when he had been an idiot obsessed with conquest, he lumped them all together, Alexander and Martha and Lafayette and anyone else who wanted to impress him. He did that because he was a fool, but more importantly if everyone was the same, he could conquest them all with all the same tactics, and what else mattered other than that? 

After he knew differently. The strangers were rejected entirely. Martha - ah, she was one of a kind, wasn’t she? - and Lafayette - and Alexander. 

Alexander, sleeping easy on him, beautiful. He resisted the urge to touch. When he woke up Alexander was gone. 

****

They played more. Drank, sometimes. Alexander hated drinking and he did it nonetheless. Washington drank less after the beating. Sometime many of his vices seemed less, after the beating. The pills helped with the pain. The rest -- 

\-- he lost his appetite for strangers. Martha was different; Lafayette he still loved and he still had but it was not so carnal, not so brutal. He could spend the rest of his life trying to pay Lafayette back for saving his life. 

One night they were playing and Alexander checkmated him after a hard-fought game and then stood up. Alexander tended to play in his jacket even when it was warm. He took off his jacket and stared at George and stared at the game and all around the room. 

“Here,” he said, and George frowned at him, reset the pieces, not understanding. 

“Here?” George repeated, and then he understood because Alexander was taking down his suspenders, staring fiercely at the ground. Then he was silent. 

Alexander brought his hands to his shirt buttons. Those buttons which George had hungered to remove for years, so intently that Alexander had left. 

“Don’t, if you don’t --” he began, but then Alexander looked at him at him and glared with such intensity that he didn’t finish. 

The shirt hung on his shoulders, unbuttoned. There was an undershirt. George gathered his confidence again. 

“I only want you to do this if you are sure, if you want to,” he said. 

“Shut up,” Alexander snapped, and wriggled the shirt off his elbows, hanging it next to the jacket on the hook. 

The undershirt was light. George could see something misshapen under it; and without knowing he would have been puzzled. Even knowing he felt a curiosity that he worked to keep hidden. Oh, did he care about this boy, in ways he thought impossible, in ways he thought worthless, in ways he thought needless and insensate. 

Oh, kick in his head a few times and he learned those feelings were more valuable than anything else. All he wanted to do was nurture them, convince Alexander he had them, that he wanted --- all he wanted was for Alexander to lay on him when they slept, to wake up together, to laugh, to play chess. Conquest was meaningless. This thing was worth it a thousand times over.

He knew the words. 

“I love you,” he said, folding his hands in his lap, to stop him from reaching. 

Alexander hissed through his teeth. He brought his hands down and clenched the hem of the undershirt, which stretched past the line of his pants. He looked at George, and George could see the rise and fall of his chest, the passion, the drive. 

Alexander closed his eyes and pulled the undershirt off in one swift moment, leaving it on the ground behind him. His fists were clenched at his sides, then, his arms shaking. He looked down and away, as far as he could from George. His teeth were gritted. 

There was no denying the deformity of it. On one of Alexander's hands he only had three fingers, and on that side the skin was strangely smooth, with a concave dip low on his stomach. The flesh was unnatural - on the top there was no nipple and none of the regular patterns of a man’s pectorals, and then flat sunkenness of it through his ribcage. The patch of strange skin was like a peninsula, and it was framed by a raised, gruesome scar that looked like a worm burrowing under him. It was as if a hole had blown in him, and the surgeon had simply pulled down the remaining skin and sewed it closed. 

“Alexander,” George said, still sitting there with his hands folded in his lap. What else did you say to a man who showed you the body he protected above everything - the same body that protected him from such an attack? 

“This is it,” Alexander said, still not looking at him. 

What did you say, to a man who showed you such a terrible wound? 

“Where?” he asked. 

“The Somme,” Alexander said, “In ‘18. San Quentin. Not the Somme of ‘16.” He snorted, and flashed his teeth in anger, “As if it wasn’t enough, for all of us to die there the first time.” ` 

George took him in. Kept taking him in, drinking him like a man who had been deprived. Strange, that something so malformed could be beautiful, that for a person like George who had always desired perfection, to find this strange and irritable man and his misshapen body and his missing fingers -- unimaginably breathtaking. As far as he was concerned, Alexander should never wear a shirt again, for how lovely he was to look at, for how much George just wanted to sit here and take him in, horrifying scar and all. 

In the silence, he felt the urge to touch and repressed it. Almost comical, that he did so. When was the last time he had wanted to touch and held back, other than with Alexander? What would him before the beating say, if that past version knew he had Alexander with no shirt on and he sat here, holding back? 

Alexander took a step closer, and another. Then he reached down and took George’s hand and pressed it to the wound, and George felt the raised line of the scar under his fingertips. He could not deny the complete foreignness of the feeling, the skin strangely hairless - perhaps from the trauma of being pulled from his back and stretched around - and the scar itself, knotted like tree bark. 

George looked at his hand, and the wound and up at Alexander. He took Alexander’s open hand and put it on his head, on the scar where the police had kicked him and Lafayette had sewn it shut as best he could. 

He felt Alexander’s fingers draw across the raised line of it, and then the man laughed. Alexander pulled his hand away from George’s head and then he laughed again, and with his typical confidence sat on George’s lap and took George’s face in both his hands. 

“All it took was for you to get the shit kicked out of you, was it?” Alexander asked, and George laughed, and George could not remember the last time he had laughed like that, before or after the raid. Alexander smirked at him, but it was something easy about it, not just a smirk. Almost a smile, really, with some humor there. Strange to think of Alexander of smiling at him. 

“What were you like, before you went to the front?” George asked. 

“Less deformed,” Alexander answered. 

It was not the answer George wanted, but he found that he did not mind. It seemed impossible he could not mind, and yet how could he mind, when Alexander sat on his lap and held his face in his hands and looked at him, something almost like affection in his eyes, and not just all the pain that George now knew extremely intimately? 

You thought you knew what you wanted in life, and then the police kicked your head in and later the boy you loved came back and you tried again and then the boy sat on your lap and held your face in your hands. You didn’t know anything, then. 

“I love you,” George said, and wrapped his hand around Alexander’s hands, “And if anyone ever holds your injuries against you or mocks you for them, I will have them killed.” 

Alexander shook his head, something mysterious in his face. Then he surged forward and kissed George with the most spectacular intensity, so much so that George’s hands went around Alexander’s waist as he kissed back, and in their efforts they knocked over the chessboard and set the black and white soldiers rattling to the ground. 

****

Had perhaps they not both been deformed in their own ways, perhaps they would have laid on the chess room floor for a long time, holding each other close and contemplating the future. 

Instead, after their ferocious lovemaking, George felt the aches of old wounds all along his bad side. The throb, to no surprise, was worse in his hip and his stomach, near old scars. He pulled himself back into chess chair, trying to rub the pain out his thigh. Alexander stood, naked, face opaque, having taken a handkerchief and cleaned their remains off him. From the back the scar looked worse, like a suitcase not quite full. 

Before the beating he had been curious, in a morbid way. He isn't sure, what he would have said then, if he had seen Alexander. Would he had ridiculed the man for his wounds, had he not had his own? 

But now … 

Instead George contemplated what he was: the speakeasy boss, back from the dead, desperately in love with the man in his employ he had scared away who had returned. A deformed romantic, come included with all the gang paranoia one could manage. And the object of his affections? One of the Great War’s many, many walking wounded. 

Not that he would ever call Alexander that. 

Because they were the people that they were - George the person that he was, at least - he thought about how people might laugh if they knew. He thought of his enemies, who hated him even more since he returned from his beating. 

He imagined his enemies going after Alexander. Alexander would mutilate them, deformity or no deformity.

George laughed. Alexander, because he was who he was, with the wounds that he carried, narrowed his eyes and turned sharply to look at him. 

“What’s so funny?” 

Before, George would have lied. 

He said, “If my enemies came for you, you would massacre them.” 

Alexander’s face contorted unexpectedly, then twisted into a mockery of a smile. His eyes were cruel and distant. “Well,” he began, with a casual air George knew meant something was wrong, “First I’d give them a good shelling, get them awake and their ears ringing. Gas next, obviously. Then after, maybe. Or maybe another round of shelling. Hard to tell.” 

Then, he turned to retrieve his pile of clothes. George watched his back, only now seeing the misstep, and kicking himself because all he did was think about their deformities, and this one, invisible -- 

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” Alexander put on his underpants, tucked himself in. Next the undershirt, and the scar disappeared, even if you could tell he wasn't quite right. “For making me think about the front?” 

“For everything,” George said. Funny how much they had fought and shouted and argued about everything, Alexander’s body included, and yet here they were, so late it was early, bared to each other in the chess room. George though about Alexander’s head thrown back, his groans. He thought about how Alexander had dug all of his remaining fingers into George’s skin, how the pain had been real and electrifying. The pain when they had beat him had been different and the same and felt like death, and this felt like life. 

He could not have been here without that beating; he would have never thought differently about Alexander’s body if his had not been mauled. He would never had epiphany _be kind, have patience_ without a boot splitting his scalp open, without having to learn to walk again, without fake teeth and one bad ear. 

The man he had never been would never suggest advice such as _be tender._

And this man who he loved, who had been damaged, might have said something else, before. Instead Alexander laughed, derisive and unfriendly. He let the shirt hang on his shoulders, making his form more regular over the undershirt. Then he put his hands in his trouser pockets and cast George a casual, opaque look. “You know, after the surgeons sewed me up, they didn’t apologize. They thought it was miracle I could keep my act together. They thought god himself had come down here and kept me going.” He snorted and rolled his eyes. “I can’t even imagine how many apologies I’d get, if everyone who made me think of hell gave me one. How the fuck do your dreams apologize to you?” 

He went back to buttoning his shirt. George knew what that was like, to lay on the table and wish for death as hands pulled at your ruined flesh. He knew was it was like to contemplate regrets as if they would be there forever, the last things you had. He knew what it was like to lay there and wonder if they end could just come a little quicker, to ease the pain. He knew what it was like to learn to walk again, regretting that you had to go on, that there was more to do. He had been so angry at Lafayette, at first. 

After you laid there you got second changes maybe you didn’t deserve. You made the best of them, though. The man you loved walked back into your bar, and the bartender yelled at him and stopped mid-word as the man already knew the code to the bookshelf to go into the secret passage, and then he showed up while you were working and you weren’t going to throw him away again. You had been injured and things were different and you understood deformity and pain and not quite being the same man you were before. You understood him in ways you could have never before. 

He didn’t answer the question. Alexander laughed again, still bitter, and put on his jacket.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” George said, instead, and finally went to retrieve his own clothes, at a pile at his feet. 

“That makes one of us,” Alexander said, and bent to offer him the pile. A strange moment of contact, there, him naked and Alexander dressed and he felt the absence between the pile of cloth, where Alexander’s fingers should have been. 

What did you do, when you laid there in the pool of your own blood, knowing with crystal clarity the errors you had left behind?

What did you do, when you took your first steps, cursing your weakness, past and present? 

What did you do, when the man you scared away in your idiocy came back? 

What did you do, when that man took his shirt off? 

“I’m glad I’m alive,” George said. Alexander met his eyes, let him have his clothes, and left. 

****

After that they fucked sometimes. In George’s grand four-poster bed, most of the time, though occasionally in the secret rooms where Alexander made fun of what he called George’s architecture fetish, and even more rarely in the empty main bar, due to how uncommonly it was empty. 

One morning after they had had sex George had gone to make himself some coffee, because neither of them were very good at sleep, and in sleep old enemies returned, the police and the war and the gas and the boots. You could drink coffee and do work instead. 

It was unusual that Alexander was still there, when he came back, and yet there he was, with all the blankets pulled up to his neck. George caught a twitch of movement before he stepped on the creaky spot on the floor, and then the man stilled. 

“Do you want some coffee?” George asked. 

Alexander nodded, so George closed the door behind him. When he came back, Alexander sitting on the edge of the bed, doubled over around his shirt. His head was bowed so far it was nearly between his knees. 

George stepped on the board again, and Alexander did not move. 

“I brought you some coffee,” George said, keeping his voice soft. He walked over and put both mugs on the bedside table on Alexander’s side. He went to squat and felt lighting bolt up his bad side. 

Alexander offered a watery chuckle at the wince that he made. 

George stood and looked at the floor and lowered himself slowly to it, trying to find a comfortable position for his legs next to the drawers of the bed. He felt Alexander watching him, and waited for a moment before looking back up at him. The man's eyes were red, and there was the gleam of past tears on his face, illuminated by the electric light on next the bedside table to the cups. 

“Is there something I can do?” George asked. 

Alexander laughed unpleasantly and let the shirt fall into George’s lap. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, then wrapped his arms around his bare chest, holding his opposite elbows. “What a question,” he replied, his voice hoarse. Then. “What did you do, that you’re so --- “ A wild gesture. “Here. With coffee. On the floor.” 

George looked at the floor, and up at the cups of coffee on the bedside table, and at Alexander’s legs in front of him, and up at the man who had at least gotten closer to sitting up straight. Alexander wasn’t looking at him. 

He understood the question, after a moment. He thought about the day Alexander had left. He had been so angry then, that Alexander could repudiate him so utterly. That Alexander could disconnect them in this whole and complete way. That Alexander had not seen his advances as gifts, as honors, as charms. That Alexander had hated it all so much he had left the city entirely. 

He thought about when the police had come and grinned at him, all violence. He thought about when they had held him down and beat him. 

“I know what I regret,” George said. 

“All it takes is the shit kicked out of you,” Alexander muttered, to the bed, and not to him. “Where’s my ass kicking?” 

“You got yours already.” 

“And I got ----” Another pause. “This.” 

George leaned back to look up less uncomfortably at Alexander. Then he put a hand on top of the bedside table to help him stand back up. It was an ordeal, and a painful one, and he heard Alexander chuckling as he struggled to his feet.

Finally having accomplished this, George took one of the cups of coffee in his hand. Then with the other hand, he reached out to unfold Alexander’s remaining fingers from around his elbow and put the cup in it. There was a pause, and then Alexander took the coffee and sipped it. 

“Thank you,” Alexander said, and watched him as he picked up the other cup and took a sip himself. 

“What you got is enough,” George said, looking at the man with the scars that he loved, that came back, that was damaged. He loved, came back, was damaged.

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **de·bride·ment** (noun) _the removal of damaged tissue or foreign objects from a wound._
> 
> you can read more about the lady codebreakers in [the woman who smashed codes](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32025298-the-woman-who-smashed-codes). also, my (and alex's) perception of wwi is based primarily on dan carlin's [blueprint to annihilation](https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/), which is like 20 hours of wwi podcast.


End file.
